Old Agricultural Writings for Modern Agrarians, Peasants, Homesteaders & Other Kindred Learners.

What Is Agriphemera?

By: Herrick Kimball

Dateline: 19 February 2015

George A Longfellow's copy of the Maine Farmer's Almanac of 1851. A lovely example of agriphemera.

Ephemera is a dictionary word for non-book, printed material that was originally produced for only short-term usefulness. Agriphemera is a word I have coined for ephemera of an agricultural nature. It includes things like almanacs, manuals, booklets, magazines, newspapers, and catalogs.

Old agriphemera (like the Farmer’s Almanac pictured above) is typically yellowed, tattered and very fragile. Most old agriphemera has not survived the years. But the writings that have survived give us a window into the agrarian nation that America once was.

People in our rural past were hands-on, self-reliant, independent-minded folks; they knew how to grow, process and preserve their own food, as well as fix or make many of the necessities of life.

Today, in these early years of the 21st Century, many people are looking to re-learn and re-apply old skills (along with old attitudes of hands-on independence) to their own lives. It is with that noble objective in mind that I have created this web site.

Agriphemera.com will serve to preserve and offer a diversity of agriphemera in the form of inexpensive pdf downloads. The downloads can be easily purchase and download to your computer with a few clicks of your mouse.

My collection of "The Cultivator and Country Gentleman." This thin-newsprint weekly periodical has survived very well since the 1870's because the individual copies were bound into book form. Each book contains one year of bound issues. This was a very rare find.